Urban Theory - Spring 2014 Weekly Reading Responses Selected Responses
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses Epistemologies of the Urban By Julia Borrowicz This week’s readings engaged with the theme of neoliberalism, its associated state apparatus and the socio-spatial configurations it takes. Through an exploration of the nature of urban, rural and forgotten spaces, scholars David Harvey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore examine the contradictions in space as well as the physical manifestations of a neoliberal state or neoliberal ‘antistate state’. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey explains the role of the state as centered on facilitating and preserving, above all, individual freedom and the institutional framework that enables strong private property rights and proper functioning of markets. Further, he concludes that freedom, in actuality, under such a system, degenerates into mere advocacy for free enterprise. Harvey explains how neoliberalism and neoliberal thinking has become all pervasive and hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It creeps into every scale of existence and every level of consciousness. It shapes worldviews and everyday actions and processes, from ways of thinking, education and entertainment to exporting it as a system of governance, aiding imperialism. Ultimately how we relate to one another, and how our relations with the state have evolved, takes the form of contractual relations. Tracing the history and rise of neoliberalism, Harvey explains how it has evolved as means of restoring class power –that of economic elites and not necessarily a traditional or ‘stable social configuration’ –though occasionally at odds with its theoretical principles. Freedom thus becomes only possible, if sustained by an all-powerful coercive state. We must question what such a freedom entails and for whom. As Harvey suggests such a regime of freedoms benefits those corporate elites that have come to control media, transportation, retail and the political process, leaving the rest of the population to consume and subsist freely under such a state of affairs. Turning to Gilmore’s piece, building on the social and spatial manifestations of neoliberalism, she explores the prison expansion of the 1980s as a tool employed to secure ideological legitimacy. Further, Gilmore argues that this has major implications on cities, creating “dead cities” without the capacity to grow and succeed. As such prisons and policing represent destructive social expenses rather than proactive social investments. Once again it becomes evident that the supposed minimalist state is only so when it comes to provision of social services and quite present when it comes to the development of ever more coercive state apparatus. Similar themes emerge in Harvey’s The Urban Process under Capitalism. Secondary investments, investment into the built environment for consumption or production, and tertiary investments, investment into science and technology and investment in social expenditure to allow reproduction of labour power, act in the interest of capital and thus an economic elite. Harvey explains that such a system of capitalism goes on unfettered precisely because through its laws of accumulation it reproduces itself. Returning to Gilmore, it becomes vital to find ways to think through such socio-spatial processes in broader and more nuanced ways that engage various scales of understanding urban, rural and abandoned spaces and their inhabitants. The term desakota stands for a reconceptualization of the ‘urban-rural forgotten’ whose inhabitants live within the constraints and spaces of state (in)action, inherent to neoliberal state power. Gilmore suggests that such broadening of our understanding of space and identity opens up the possibility for new forms of organization and activism. What can a designation such as desakota bring to our thinking and conceptualization of inner city spaces within New York? How can it be useful in addressing issues discussed around inequality and homelessness? Further, how can we begin to effectively challenge the neoliberal state apparatus that reproduces such space and human relations within it?
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses Post-Fordism I By Ronald Morrison This week in continuing our thematic course from scale and scale jumping, to a macro understanding of neoliberalism and the creative capacities of forgotten spaces to inform our roles as activist scholars, we move into the particulars of knowledge production and place based technologies for crafting “subatern” relationships between, time, space, actors, capital, and value. Wood’s piece is a working homage to return value to Black American blues music as a technology for combating and illuminating the experiential discord of living within the violent colonialist restructuring of the state under neoliberalism. In expanding the ways in which knowledge is valued through traditional social, economic academic discourse Woods points his investigation of neoliberalism at the onset of the neoplantation and the Southern Strategy in deconstructing the gains made during Reconstruction. In recognizing strategies for survival and resilience, Woods notes how the blues works as a academy of organic intellectual thought analyzing the removal of welfare related gains in a rich textural cultural production that moved across time and space relating working class people. Woods crafts the blues as a “geographic knowledge” and shows its utility in furthering Harvey’s 4 pillars of converting traditional geographic knowledge into a relevant political praxis. Lucia Trimbur’s piece, Com Out Swinging, is another example of how investigations into the particular and specific of “forgotten” or “subaltern” spaces can be generative in producing indigenous knowledges that counteract how we understand ourselves and the landscapes of neoliberalism. Here it is the site of the community boxing gym nearly defunct in the age of post-industrialization, that serves as a space mutable and strategic in altering the ways in which certain people redefine their relationships to capitalist definitions of valuable and productive bodies. Both of these pieces urge us to question, what are the discursive limits of how knowledge comes to be made and known? Additionally, as we move further into our research practices as activist scholars and urbanists where do we recognize the sites for investigation? These works are crucial in that they are able to recognize the inherent value of place and unearth the power counter narratives present. The immensely present assumption within this practice is that people are the experts of their own experiences and not only maintain the capacity to illustrate such expertise but are also capable of demonstrating the power to transcend across time and space in forging alliances of hope and resilience. It is an important and crucial call to remember the importance of cultural production as intellectual thought. Further, it pushes the disciplines of the formal academy into awkward and seemingly unlikely spaces as points of analysis, ultimately moving from the small, specific and particular, toward a more reflective universal of mobilized and sustaining practices of knowledge and knowing.
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses Sara Mindard Post-Fordism II This week’s readings primarily expose how the marginal communities, particularly black urban poor, have been affected by the transformation in the United States from the Fordist- Keynesian ‘welfare’ state to establishing neoliberal reforms, privatization and corporate models. In ‘Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations’, Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner argue that the urban space has proved to be ultimately a ‘decisive battleground’ for the self-perpetuating neoliberal creative destruction that follows the crises at the end of Fordist-Keynesian welfare state. The article also argues Neoliberalism inherently reinforces the crises it tries to address, producing (and reproducing) uneven and unstable topographies. The concepts of Neoliberal restructuring, as discussed by Peck et al, is explored by Loïc Wacquant in his book Punishing the Poor, as he examines the scales in which the penal state upholds and protects hegemonic social, economic and political values (by ensuring marginal groups do not rebel against their social environment) and reaffirms the authority of the state. Wacquant argues that US was never truly a ‘welfare’ state, but rather a ‘charitable’ one, a distinction that leads to way for the transformation to a penal state. Rather than acknowledging that poverty is in part a result of greater society failings, poverty is seen as an individual’s crisis and one that is solved on an individual level, which neoliberal policy treats as ‘dependency’. Wacquant also argues that America criminalizes the poor as a way to keep them hidden from the public landscape, thereby reinforcing the main-stream vision of a stable and prosperous society. This policy, however, only perpetuates poverty and hopelessness and it is socially reproduced as the criminalized find it both economically and socially challenging to disassociate and move on from their pasts. On another scale, Damien Schnyder reveals the horrendous failures of the Los Angeles public school system as it becomes an increasingly privatized institution. By ‘criminalizing’ students through the Abolish Chronic Truancy (ACT) program, young adults find themselves in debt due to fines associated with ACT, stigmatized as being criminal, and I would argue, demoralized by being let down by the educational system. Schnyder argues that this is a goal of the state and has historical connections to 19thCentury industrialists marginalizing the poor (particulary the black poor) as they were needed as a viable and low paid workforce. Key to this repression was ensuring the black population remained uneducated and isolated and therefore unable to mobilize for social change. These readings recalled for me an article from January in The New York Times about police surveillance of rappers to uncover leads on gang rivalries and related violence. The article reveals that instead of stop-and-frisk tactics, police are now focusing on investigating larger organized violence, through the lyrics and music videos posted online by rappers. The article states: ‘Rappers often stand accused of being central players in the city’s most endemic gun violence between rival crews, if not always directly in the shootings themselves, then in the conspiracies underpinning them.’ The article follows one young man who has been in and out of jail and has faced charges made based on his rap videos. This young man is quoted: “But if they do a crime, you can’t make that fall back on the one that’s trying to make it out of the hood. If they lock us up, who’s going to get us out of the hood?” The parallels between the case of surveillance and criminality of rappers of New York’s urban poor and the articles by Wacquant and Schnyder’s articles reveal the dangers of these new police tactics. By criminalizing rappers for their lyrics, rather than actual evidence of illegal activity, is another example of how the penal state is acting to stigmatize urban poor. This case is evokes Wacquant’s description of
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses the ‘war on drugs’ which he calls a ‘guerrilla campaign of penal harassment of low-level street dealers and poor consumers, aimed primarily at young men in the collapsing inner city for whom the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible and reliable source of gainful employment in the wake of the twofold retrenchment of the labor market and the welfare state’. (Wacquant, p 61) The readings are helpful in revealing how neoliberal reforms and policy have led to deepening inequality and a grossly ineffective and unfair criminalization of the urban working class poor. However, few suggestions are made for how we should move forward. Agreed is that neoliberal reform has failed it’s citizens in multiple ways, particularly on the municipal level, through the penal state, and through privatization of the education system. Peck et al suggest that time will reveal if rollout neoliberalism ‘will provide openings for more progressive, radical democratic re-appropriations of city space, or if market disciplinary, neoliberal agendas will be entrenched still further within the underlying institutional structures of urban governance.’ (Peck, Theodore, Brenner, p. 65) It becomes increasingly necessary for urban practitioners to understand this environment of deeply embedded policy that acts systematically to stigmatize and repress some of societies most vulnerable populations, so that future policies and decisions will act to lift the more exploitive elements of our society. Source: Joseph Goldstein and J. David Goodman, ‘Seeking Clues to Gangs and Crime, Detectives Monitor Internet Rap Videos,’ New York Times, January 7, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/nyregion/seeking-clues-to-gangs-and-crime-detectives-monitorinternet-rap-videos.html?ref=josephgoldstein
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses Policing and the City By Nora Elmarzouky Fear, security, protection, control. Four words whose definitions are often manipulated and the borders are often blurred by the mass media, politicians, spokesmen of particular ideologies, and others to implement more stringent “law and order” policies, as pointed out by Hall, Dinzey-Flores, and Hanhardt. Why is there such an urge for the visibility of security measures and what does it really mean and for whom? Often the idea of security is paradoxically implemented, as it produces security for some and control and the reproduction of more insecurity for others. Both Dinzey-Flores and Hanhardt discuss the correlation between various means of policing and the desire to protect property values, prestige, and exclusivity. In the case of gated communities the fence and security technology are heavily implemented as a means to secure these locations and shield the people, of upper class usually white communities, from the fear of “crime” and insecurity that takes place in public space on the individual and potentially on their properties. In the case of San Francisco’s Castro and New York City’s Greenwich Village, rather than a fence, the semi-vigilante groups employed policing techniques in the streets that loosely aligned them with the formal policing structure and equated possible threatening attacks with actual violence. These two groups particularly, isolated themselves to a geographic location and their goals separately from other minority and gay activist and leftists groups and their calls for increased policing tactics, reduced economic diversity in their particular geographic locations, which actually increased their property values. Their narrow understanding of the threat and violence overall aligned them with the overarching analysis of urban violence of the time, rather than taking a deeper understanding beyond pathological responses to the problems of urban violence directed at gay communities. The act of patrolling and calling upon increased policing, intensified gentrification in the area, as it impelled increased speculation of property values. Hall, Dinzey-Flores, and Hanhardt demonstrate the embedded racial and class tensions when discussing security and law and order. With gated communities in Puerto Rico, and increasingly around the world, it is clear that those of upper class, generally white have the capabilities to not only turn what should be public into private space, but keeps a certain type of person from entering into that space. Whereas when the gates are used in the case of lower-income public housing or “slum” areas, they are not only of poorer backgrounds, but often of a different race, and these gates are used to restrict movement and maintain constant surveillance on the “dangerous” people of the community. These are physical impetuses that maintain a separation of people within one community largely based on racial profiling and ignores how the system maintains their position in these places. Hanhardt also demonstrates the element of racial divide in the desire for some to be more secure, although these people took their policing tactics into their own hands and fed their fears into the overall policing system. In both Castro and Greenwich Village, their communities were predominantly white males and their surrounding communities were of lower income black or Latino populations, so their fears, although publicized as that of fear for their gay status and freedom was actually wrapped up in the fears of racial groups. Hall takes this further by not only demonstrating the history of the use of the word mugging both in the US and its transfer to Britain, but how this term is also embedded with racial and class connotations due to the context of its use in the US, even if not explicitly said. The introduction and mass use of this term gave not only the policing apparatus more room to implement “law and order” techniques on certain populations, but allowed for the legal system to become harsher on those accused of particular crimes. In addition to the embedded racial and class tensions in the discussions on security and protection are the convoluted usage of statistics in mass media, as well as the lack of understanding the real roots of the problem. Many of these policing techniques that are discussed and often employed, whether physical borders or security apparatuses in the street, look to the surface level of the crime
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses being committed at that time rather than trying to understand deeper and fixing the real cause of these crimes. They are quick solutions that are reported on in a way that tells the public they are more secure. They are techniques that they can generally see, whereas much of the problems that cause these crimes to take place are not as visible to the general public, whether they choose not to see it or simply unaware. The media plays a really important role in how they use these terms of fear, security, and protection to allow the public to be more open to the various forms of control that take place. It is often represented as being directed at a certain group and if you are not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing worry about. The reality is, the ways in which these terms are used justifies the reproduction of insecurity on an already insecure portion of most populations. This was particularly highlighted to me in the Central Park Five documentary when the five guys talked about their lives after they were released from prison, particularly Raymond Santana, when he discussed being forced into drug dealing and the cycle in which he found himself in. Even though the charges from the jogger case was dropped against him, it probably would not cross the mind of the judiciary to reconsider the charges against him for drug dealing as a product of the unfair system against him. All of these articles focus on the role of mass media that really influences and shapes how people think regarding fear, security, and protection, and the links they make between potential threats and real violence, which allows policy-makers to easily justify the implementation and necessary need for tough “law and order� policies. Even further, these articles highlight the nature of violent crimes as being sporadic and could possibly happen at any time to anyone that intensifies this fear and faith in the policing system as a means to combat these threats. One question that came to me while reading Hall’s layout of the rolling out of the term mugging into the British language in 72 was why was there such a deep need for it at this particular time? What was happening in Britain to seemingly introduce this fear and differentiation of the society? Overall, how do these quick fixes for security really help anyone? It only seems to be increasing overall insecurity of all and draining governmental and private resources in the wrong direction? The discussion happening in these articles in the 70s is exactly the same debate as now and policing tactics are continuously on the rise.
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses Social Production and Everyday Life By Nadia Elokdah Each of this week’s readings examine the various and simultaneous intersectionalities of race, class, and gender as a vehicle to identify racial disparity, structural exclusion, and historical frameworks of oppression, resilience, and resistance. Within this latter dialogue, each reading provides a context for social opposition, confrontation, and the opportunity for alternative possibilities that are derived out of the lived experiences of those within, often inescapable, systems of marginality. Mullings uses the framework of the Sojourner Syndrome to provide a broader conceptualization of the interactions of race, class, and gender and the resultant impacts in producing critical health issues, including infant mortality and childhood asthma. Particularly significant to Mullings argument is the framing of race, class, and gender as “historically created relationships of differential distribution of resources, privilege, and power or advantage and disadvantage,” rather than attributes of specific segments of the population. (Mullings 79-80). Through various ethnographic methodologies, she and a team of researchers examined the lived experiences of Harlem residents through environment and housing struggles, employment insecurity, and networks of lacking and/or supportive kinship. Through an acute analysis on both individual and group struggle in the face of structurally reproduced class constraints, embodied discrimination, and spatial exclusion, Mullings presents systematic and persistent opportunities of resistance by the women of Harlem. With this illumination, she provides a channel for questioning the hegemonic discourse surrounding access and social reform. As she closes the argument for a wider lens of analysis and intervention, Mullings calls for “direct attention to such major structural changes as a living wage and full employment, restoration of full civil rights for former prisoners who have completed their terms of incarceration, free quality public education for all, and universal health care” (Millings 88). She points to the unintended consequences of the civil rights struggle to end legal segregation which expanded freedom and democracy for additional groups of ‘other,’ attributing the valuation of interconnectedness seen by Sojourner Truth as proof-positive for the encompassing benefits of a majority with the elimination of struggle for the minority. Mullings’ Central Harlem case study provides a supplementary dialogue to that of The Neoliberal American Dream as Daydream: Counter-hegemonic Perspectives on Welfare Restructuring in the United States, from Morgen and Gonzales, within which structural inequality, discrimination, and class stigmatization are examined countering the rampant hegemonic perspective of wildly successful welfare reform in a neoliberal discourse. The pervasive neoliberal logic, perpetuated by policy-makers and the media alike, prioritizes a specific type of citizenship, one of individual productivity, active consumption, and personal responsibility/sufficiency. Noncompliance to such ideology and practice renders the individual deficient. Through the inquiry of their counter-proposal, Morgen and Gonzales dispute the commonsensical understanding of neoliberalism as seamless and complete; rather, they identify incomplete and uneven impacts that are challenged by those exactly targeted as individually deficient. Set within the low-income former welfare and Food Stamp recipients in Oregon, the authors use informational interviews to identify the structural issues produced by the ‘American Dream’ where a unwavering focus on capitalism leads to chronic joblessness and systemic discrimination within and outside of the employment system. The characterization of welfare reform as ‘pro-work, pro-family, pro-independence’ in fact led to a “highly racialized and deeply entrenched ‘politics of disgust’ that portrays welfare recipients as welfare queens, morally suspect and irresponsible mothers,” (Morgen and Gonzales 222). This is prominently seen through the interviews where such hegemonic neoliberal discourse is contested as unfair and unjust.
Urban Theory Weekly Reading Responses It is key that a sense of justice is employed by those interviewed in both studies; given the harsh realities of capitalist market relations and the particular gendered, racialized, class position of individuals, the struggles are structural barriers of low-wage employment and poverty. Within these opportunities of alternative possibilities and counter-narratives, personal and state responsibility are constructed as complementary rather than oppositional. Each article denotes the production of social and cultural systems of survival through means not reliant on the state, which contest the hegemony of neoliberalism; however, both also identify the reproduction of ruinous physical and emotional health consequences, as well as systems of isolation and exclusion within larger social structures. The counter-hegemonic perspectives, stemming from lived experience, must be allowed to compete with the greatly magnified neoliberal discourse within politics and media. These ‘cracks and fissures’ have the potential to widen this lens of examination and understanding to create and reproduce new forms of resistance. How then as practitioners, can we capture and make beneficial these moments of contestation?